Gruff Rhys: 'I've been trying to build a hotel out of shampoo bottles'

At the age of 40, the Super Furry Animal turned solo star is still making singular music. But why is he launching his new album at a hotel in Blackpool?

The business of making a living from pop in this economic climate is fraught, especially given that the industry languishes in the doldrums more than most. If you've reached a certain age and don't want to trade on nostalgia, the one booming area of business, the matter is only further complicated. But Gruff Rhys, chief figure in Super Furry Animals, now pursuing a complementary career as a solo artist who turned 40 last year, seems to have found one solution: to launch his new album, he is taking over a hotel in Blackpool for a night.

A reservation for the event next weekend secures you a ticket for a concert in the ballroom, breakfast the following morning, and a signed copy of the CD, Hotel Shampoo. A single room package will set you back £62.50, with double and twin room options also available. It's a very neat example of the new ways in which artists are looking to foster a more meaningful relationship with their fans as the traditional models of the pop business fall into meltdown. But it is also typical of the sort of the thing that Rhys has always loved to do.

Other recent projects include his collaboration with electronic artist Boom Bip using the moniker Neon Neon, which resulted in the Mercury prize-nominated Stainless Style, a loose concept album based on the life of DeLorean Motor Company founder John DeLorean. Rhys called it "a very frivolous electro-pop record about the first playboy engineer". He guested, too, on the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, with De La Soul.

Then there was the record he made last year with Brazilian TV repairman Tony Da Gatorra, titled The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness; this was half-intended as the soundtrack to Separado!, a documentary about a trip that Rhys made to Patagonia in South America to meet members of his family, whose ancestors had emigrated from Wales in the late 19th century. "I like to find different ways of touring," he tells me when we meet. "I wanted to do an investigative concert tour – something that had a purpose beyond just being the band that has to fill this particular venue on that particular night."

So it was that he spent two weeks gigging around the tea houses and schools of the Chubut Valley, meeting some of the area's 1,500-odd Welsh-speakers, producing a most surreal travelogue. When he says, screwing up his eyes, that "it was one of the most intense things I've ever done", it's easy to believe him.

The new album is a more relaxed affair: a record made to come to terms with his impending big birthday last July. As Rhys explains it: "I could see it looming and I wanted to confront it. So I thought I should make an album of piano ballads, possibly with saxophone. And it should be a record that didn't engage with popular culture."

The result isn't exactly that but, rather, a beautifully lush record, redolent of late 60s Beach Boys, with a wistfully personal bent. Perhaps inevitably, it involves a peculiar conceit, too. "I had a batch of songs that were quite reflective, picking up on different bits of my life over the last 15 to 20 years," he says. "By a complete coincidence, I've been trying to build a hotel out of shampoo bottles. I started touring seriously 15 years ago [with Super Furry Animals] and I thought this may not happen for ever, so I started hoarding souvenirs.

"After three or four years, I realised there didn't seem to be an end in sight, so at that point I decided to build a hotel out of bits and pieces I'd taken from other hotels – so if the shit hit the fan, I could have somewhere to live."

It's not always easy to follow Rhys's meandering thoughts, but it seems that that project stalled for some time, only to be recently restarted: that is, he's been building an art installation at home. Then, when writing the new album, "both things started to complement each other... it helped me finish some songs. Having something like 'Honey All Over', which is a song about a femme fatale character... I was able to make up an imaginary shower gel product for the title."

Rhys is the son of Ioan Bowen Rees, "a poet, essayist, polemicist, mountaineer, internationalist and white robe druid of the Gorsedd of Bards", according to his Guardian obituary. An imaginative sensibility sustained Rhys growing up in the village of Rachub. "I spoke Welsh but when I fell in love with music, it was with bands like the Velvet Underground," he says.

We discuss how amazing it seemed to him that the Velvets' John Cale hailed from the Welsh valleys. "And he was my gateway to New York junkie music, as a 13-year-old."

His first band were called Ffa Coffi Pawb – a name that translates as "everybody's coffee beans" but means something rude when sounded out phonetically – who mutated into the Super Furries. Signed to Creation and sharing a label with Oasis in the mid-90s, the band enjoyed hits like "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" that saw them lumped in with other Britpop acts; but the outfit have always resisted easy categorisation – as the Guardian wrote of Dark Days/Light Years, their ninth album, released two years ago, "it has more spark and invention than most teen bands manage on their debuts".

Super Furry Animals remain a going concern, of which Rhys says, "we're at our best when we're all heavily involved, all throwing our ideas in and making something completely over the top". Whereas with his solo albums – Hotel Shampoo is his third – "I've got quite a clear idea of what I'm doing. So the two things are quite different. Well... in my head they're quite different things."

Also, he is now the father of two children, aged two and not yet one, and recording on his own suits his home life in Cardiff better. Not that he intends to settle down – Separado!, he reveals, is intended as part of a trilogy. "I'm keen on two more investigative concert tours," he says. "I don't want to talk about them too much but, hopefully, the next one will rewrite American history. So it's not too ambitious."

One other thing he says is, "I still feel a bit of a fraud that I make a living as a musician", but the thought lingers: if only there were more like him.

Hotel Shampoo is released on OVNI/Turnstile on 14 Feb. For info on Gruff Rhys's Blackpool hotel date and subsequent UK tour, visit gruffrhys.com

Contributor

Caspar Llewellyn Smith

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Gruff Rhys: Hotel Shampoo – review
Gruff Rhys's trawl through 20 years of life on the road produces a mellow, inventive yet slightly bleak album, writes Kitty Empire

Kitty Empire

13, Feb, 2011 @12:05 AM

American Interior review – Gruff Rhys's vivid and exhilarating journey
Gruff Rhys's latest project celebrates 18th-century explorer John Evans with humour and pathos, writes Ally Carnwath

Ally Carnwath

03, May, 2014 @11:05 PM

Gruff Rhys – review
A wonderful 90 minutes with the maverick Welshman, part wistful singer-songwriter, part bone-dry comic. No one else makes music like this, writes Dave Simpson

Dave Simpson

19, Jul, 2011 @6:00 PM

Article image
New music: Gruff Rhys – Whale Trail

Michael Cragg: Gruff Rhys has composed the music to an iPhone game about guiding a whale through a Technicolor world … could anyone be better suited to the task?

Michael Cragg

28, Sep, 2011 @12:19 PM

Article image
Waxing Lyrical: Gruff Rhys, Super Furry Animals

The Furries frontman on singing in two languages, perfecting the cover version and how he was inspired by a Harold Pinter play

Louis Pattison

24, Feb, 2011 @2:32 PM

Article image
Gruff Rhys: ‘I found Britpop difficult. We couldn’t really get on board’
The musician, 48, on the importance of his Welsh identity, campaigning to remain and taking a tank to festivals to use as a sound system

James McMahon

21, Jul, 2018 @12:59 PM

Article image
Neon Neon – review

Neon Neon's collaboration with the National Theatre of Wales makes for a fascinating spectacle, writes Kitty Empire

Kitty Empire

08, Jun, 2013 @11:06 PM

Article image
Gruff Rhys announces new album, film, book and app

American Interior will tell the tale of John Evans, who set out to find a Welsh-speaking Native American tribe in 1792

Guardian music

29, Jan, 2014 @2:00 PM

Article image
Gruff Rhys: Babelsberg review – never mind dystopia, feel the orchestra
It’s supposed to be a paean to alienation, but Rhys uses 72 musicians to focus the mind on a lush 70s-style sound palette

Michael Hann

08, Jun, 2018 @8:00 AM

Article image
Gruff Rhys: American Interior review – wit, originality and indelible tunes
The former Super Furry Animals frontman's new concept album is an absolute pleasure, however much of the concept you care about, writes Jon Dennis

Jon Dennis

01, May, 2014 @8:30 PM